Liwa Oasis

After nearly a year of living in the desert, we finally made it to the desert proper!  Abu Dhabi consists of about 85% of the UAE by land mass, only a small portion of which is Abu Dhabi city.  Much of the inland area is known as the Empty Quarter, once the home of the Bedouin, and first mapped out by Wilfred Thesiger on foot in the 1940s, just as oil exploration was beginning.





The Empty Quarter is the largest sand desert in the world, but there are oases.

Oasis is a relative term -- there is a bit more sand than green.  The absence of the usual desert scruff means that the red sand can form incredible dunes.

The dunes are other-wordly -- they reminded us of Luke Skywalker's home planet. Apparently we aren't the first to think so; Star Wars was shot here in May.

In fact, the cast and crew rented out our entire hotel for a month.

It was very hot during the day, but grew more pleasant at sunset.  We scurried up some dunes to get the best view.

 We saw sand spiders....








...little lizards (too fast for our camera) and beetles.

But mostly just enjoyed playing in the beautiful sand formations as the sun set....and lolling in the warm dunes to watch the stars coming out. 

Spring-time in Stockholm

Stockholm is one third water...

....one third park....



...and one third city.



It is also a hundred percent cute. Here is a public bathroom:

 Here is a phone booth:

And here is a bridge.



When we visited friends in Stockholm a few weeks back, when the city was flooded with spring.The whole world smelled like lilacs.





Our friends live on Kungsholmen, an island brimming with young people. We saw them in full force, running around the island, picnicking by the water, and sunbathing. We have never seen so many buff, happy-looking people in one place.

We expected to find a city -- instead, we often felt as if we were in the middle of a wedding, or a sappy rom com. (Imagine living in the grassy church scene at the end of Funny Face for a week! Only Fred and Audrey were missing.) We couldn't go for a walk without seeing baby birds -- we counted five different kinds. Unfortunately, no good documentation for the goslings, signets, and more obscure sorts of baby duck we encountered. A mallard, and our apologies.












We saw willows weeping, fields of lush dandelions and banks of violets.


We played mini-golf....

....went running, and biked, and even kayaked around the islands, all the while shepherded by our lovely hosts. 

Stockholm is perfect for biking, and we biked everywhere, stopping for fika (the Swedish word for coffee + sweet snack), and enjoying the sunshine. Our hosts were charmed by the warm weather, and we were delighted to be able to move around without breaking a sweat.
 

It was so beautiful out, that we had a hard time going inside. We did make it into the national church, where the royal family has marriages and baptisms. A wonderful impromptu song broke out from other visitors. 

And we had to go in to see the Vasa, a ship which set out on her maiden voyage in 1628, and promptly sank. The Baltic Sea is brackish, and the Vasa remained well-preserved underwater until 1961, when a massive international team managed to pull her up, whole. The ship may not be sea-worthy, but we were impressed anyway.

We didn't expect to enjoy Swedish food as much as we did (Mary Wollstonecraft is far out of date, but she was so damning of the fare that her censure stuck). The tradition of sandwiches for breakfast made us extremely happy, as did other sandwiches: here, skagen, shrimp mixed with caviar and dill on toast, made by our hosts. 

On the sweeter end of the spectrum, we tried chocolate balls and princess torte, and were not in the least disappointed.

Well, Nick was.

But disappointments couldn't linger long. There was so much else to do, and see, and eat, and smell, and chat about. 

 

 

There were cliffs to climb and views to see, grass to loll in and flowers to gaze upon.

 

 

It was a wonderful week of being outside in a beautiful city with dear friends.  

 

Tuesday nights at the track

On Tuesday nights, there are no Ferraris to be seen inside Yas Island's track. Instead, the public is invited in to bike and run around the 5.5 kilometer circuit. And the public comes out in full force.

Tents await outside. They (and Nick) are decked out as if for a race.

Here are the most famous members of the Yas Circuit -- infamous for doing up to five laps in punishing heat and humidity. Most slackers only do one or two. 

Afterwards, it is off to IKEA to feast. With signs like these, it is lucky we know how to get there.....

But we make it every time.

The unlimited lattes are calling.

Grinda

"In the summer twilight islands seem to rise 

on the horizon. Old villages are on 

their way, retreating further into woods

on the seasons' wheels with magpie creaking.

When the year kicks off its boots, and the sun

climbs higher, the trees break out in leaves 

and take wind and sail out in freedom."

-Tomas Tranströmer, 17 Poems

On our last full day in Sweden, we took a ferry to Grinda, one of the islands in the Stockholm archipelago, where Tranströmer's lines seemed to come true. The whole world seemed ready to sail out in freedom -- leaves, birds, sky, sun....and us along with it.  

Inhabited since the middle ages, Grinda was largely farmland until it was bought by Henrik Santesson, the first director of the Nobel Foundation. Santesson built a lovely villa there, but sold the island to the city of Stockholm in 1944. It has since become a park and nature preserve. 

About half the island is a working farm, with cows, goats and chickens. Fresh eggs sit for sale inside the barn -- just take the eggs, and leave your money in a jar.

Trails fan through the pastures to the woods behind. We wandered through birch groves and cliffy outlooks, winding up again in the fields, surrounded by goats. Midway through our hike, our host realized that he'd spent his bachelor party creeping through those very woods -- army style, in the middle of the night. Our trip was a little less wild, but we enjoyed imagining his epic day a few months ago.

We have an ongoing debate over which is the greenest place in the world -- Evergreen State College in Olympia, Burke's Gardens in Virginia, or a little gravelly patch called Sowers Mill Dam Road....but Grinda, with its impossibly lush meadows backed by dense forest, gave us pause. You can see why...

Circling an island, however small it may be, makes us hungry. We stopped at the house Santesson built -- now a restaurant -- for lunch. (Lunch in Sweden is no sandwich affair. Sandwiches, we learned in Rattvik, are actually a breakfast food. Instead, we sat down for dinner, round one. And what a dinner it was!)

Two heaping baskets of bread, some seafood stew and asparagus-gnocchi later, we wandered back to the dock, full of sun and cider, ready to laze on the beach before setting sail (or, rather more prosaically, catching the ferry) home.